The Art of Biography:

Christopher Isherwood

JOSH ZAJDMANI love the book; it occupied my whole mind and made my Google history much more interesting.

KATHERINE BUCKNELLThank you. I spent a really long time writing it, and probably because of the pandemic, longer than I might have. But I’m happy with the way it came out. It’s long; if I’d had my druthers, it would have been longer. I grew up on things like Leon Edel’s five-volume Henry James [1953–72].

JZDefinitely—that’s a favorite of mine, as well. How did you come to Isherwood as a subject?

KBI wrote my PhD thesis about W. H. Auden, specifically his juvenilia. Isherwood and Auden were friends from the time they met at boarding school, and when they reconnected as young adults, in 1925, Auden sent Isherwood pretty much everything he’d written up to that date, and Isherwood saved it all. Auden went on sending him everything he wrote from then on. Isherwood was a born archivist and collector and I went to California to study his collection of Auden poems—he’d already died when I was working on the project, sadly, but Don Bachardy, his partner, welcomed me, and I sat in the dining room and worked there for a week. We connected through that, and then Don asked if I’d like to edit Isherwood’s diaries. I said yes without having any idea what I was really saying yes to. And there went the next twenty-five years of my life [laughter]. It was over a million words of diaries and then I did a volume of letters. After that, my agent said, “Hmm, don’t you think you should do a biography?”

JZWere you at all resistant when a biography was suggested?

KBI was daunted, but I put on my “I-can-be-a-professional” hat and wrote up a proposal, which proved to demonstrate no inkling of how the business of biographies works. The publishers are in a commercial world, where everything is monetized, and they want a book that’s a size that will fit on the Amazon shelf and can be packaged like a box of Cheerios. But a proper, honest biography can’t really compromise itself in that way, so it’s a negotiation. From the start, I had so much material (three, four thousand documents, some of them hundreds of pages long) across so many locations (libraries and archives all over the United States, all over the UK and Europe) and I thought, partway through, that it was too big for anyone to do in a way that a publisher would be happy to sell. I mean, I gave my publishers a three-volume idea: “Let’s have three little paperbacks and they’ll come out simultaneously but we’ll have youth, middle age, old age.” I thought that would mean you could have a little paperback in your hip pocket on the subway. That was mocked [laughter]. What you can imagine, when you’re all alone writing, would suit your subject, and what someone in a big meeting full of important people who want to spend money on it are considering—those are two different things. This is my first biography, so this was a lesson learned along the way.

JZWell, I’m glad you won out in terms of writing with such scope—it’s a big book and I’d put it on the shelf with Henry James by Edel, and Hermione Lee’s and Robert Caro’s assorted biographies. This is a biography that suits the subject.

KBI feel honored to be named with those names. I did put everything into it that I could. I immersed myself in Isherwood’s life. I reread his diaries, his mother’s diaries, all his letters. I tried to read all the books that he read. I saw a lot of the movies he saw. Because you know, the great mystery really is, how did he make the work? This is a writer whom we should admire for his literary achievements and also for how he lived. You have the gay icon, and then you also have the mysterious, chameleonlike, elusive, will-o’-the-wisp creature who seemed to be always changing, absorbing everything that was happening around him and presenting it back for us in a work like Goodbye to Berlin [1939]. He was this very charming, engaging person who always played down any talent, any intelligence—he always said, “Oh, Auden was the intellectual one”—but he was brilliant, incredibly well read. For him there weren’t distinctions between high literature and pulp. He read it all; same with the movies. And this matches with his engagement with human beings—he was curious about absolutely everyone, regardless of social status.

JZAs I was reading, his consistent ability to see value in that wide range of literature, people, film . . . it was so inspiring and touching. His life can serve as a reminder to engage with the world; everything is worthwhile and living fully is the only way to live.

KBI agree with that. He observed already when he was very young this problem of collateral damage in the great events of the world, where the generals or the presidents or the monarchs are running the show and it’s the minor figures—the young people, the unemployed, the vulnerable—who are the collateral damage. When he was ten, World War I suddenly blew his world apart and his father was killed and the family fortune subsequently declined. That resulted in a range of identifications with so much of the world around him. And then of course when he moved to Berlin, which was the enemy power in that same war, he met so many people there who were going to be crushed all over again when Hitler took over, people he identified with. He was on to that theme from very young. And then after he moved to America and became a Hindu and schooled himself in nonattachment and a wider love . . . you say it’s touching, which is interesting, because he didn’t permit himself much sentiment as a young man. He tried to control that, but once he became a follower of Prabhavananda, love was okay, and from there a huge amount of love flows out of him toward whomever he’s writing about and whomever he’s with.

JZThere’s a motif of haunting that pervades this book—from the two wars, whether it’s his father dying in the first or his coming of age and fleeing Germany before the second, but also actual ghosts, which we learn he was terrified by in his childhood home.

KBYes, in the house where he grew up, in Cheshire, and his grandparents’ house, where he spent a lot of his school holidays, Marple Hall. A huge number of ghost stories were attached to these houses, in ways romantic and frightening. He wrote a lot about those hauntings as an adult in Kathleen and Frank [1971]. He had a sense that psychic evil was real from a young age, growing up in this enormous, gloomy house where he was often left with just his nanny while his parents were traveling abroad. It didn’t help that his favorite story as a child, [Beatrix Potter’s] “Roly-Poly Pudding” [1908], about a kitten who’s kidnapped and taken behind the wainscoting where the rats are going to make him into a pudding, was so aesthetically akin to his own setting. But then there’s a shift when he leaves England and moves to Berlin. He comes to feel more comfortable identifying with the creatures behind the wainscoting. The way to neutralize what you perceive to be evil: go toward your fear. Become part of it.

That links up with his sexuality: if you were a homosexual in the ’20s and ’30s, in the United Kingdom where he lived then and in the United States where he lived later, it was against the law. You were classed as a criminal. The Oscar Wilde trial was not long ago, and he was very much aware of that history growing up. Eventually I think he did enjoy the freedom of saying, “I’ll join the other side, this menace of evil, hauntings”; he dressed up as a ghost with his cousin and frightened the maids, and then they felt a lot better. When he went to Berlin, he immersed himself in a milieu that his mother would have been horrified by—partly his sex life but partly the fact that a lot of the people he socialized with had broken one law or another and had even been to the reformatory or prison for it.

JZYou write that he worked on the boundary of fiction and nonfiction. Did you find that intentional, or was it just how his output unfolded?

KBHe tried different things in each of his books. Sometimes he’d write what he called a contraption novel, with a full plot and fully fictionalized imaginary people. Other times he did something much closer to his diary. But even his purported diary pieces, like the first and last sections of Goodbye to Berlin, are very fictionalized. One of the tasks in the book was finding out what actually took place and how he reshaped it, because you can really work out what his intention was by seeing the differences. As soon as you know, here’s what actually happened and here’s how he transformed it into fiction, you are privy to his plan. He had an artistic intention, which can be understood in a political way—to bring the homosexual into the drawing room, so to speak, as a figure who could be attractive and funny as well. He used humor a lot to make something attractive. If you have something you want the world to change its mind about, you’re going to try all different strategies.

What he left out also gives a clue as to the intentions of his work. One reason he needed such a huge biography is to say, “Look at the weight of what he left out. The ballast underlying these delicate works is so much deeper and more complex than people have seen previously.” And now that we’re in a very different phase with regard to sexual diversity, it’s much easier to talk about, but we don’t want to forget what was happening in that period. So we need to talk about it.

JZCan we talk about faith for a minute? Whether it’s the appearance of faith, or the evaporation of it, or just the need for it, it’s a constant with Isherwood. How did he relate to faith as he moved through his life?

KBHe definitely needed to believe in something. Usually he described wishing to believe in something personified in another human being. So he always liked to have a mentor, whether it was Gerald Heard or Swami Prabhavananda. He had a real need to devote himself to something outside himself—to his guru, and also to Don Bachardy, his companion. His last book, My Guru and His Disciple [1980], is about his religious life, and you can see that he had an extremely religious personality. Art and the sacred were for him places where you access the energy of the universe, which is just a huge, frightening, unknowable, exciting, thrilling thing that he wanted to get at all the time. So I think art and religion for him are adjacent if not sometimes overlapping.

JZWith so many interesting people in his life, what was the calculus of explaining those people’s lives as you made your way through? He encountered so many brilliant characters of the twentieth century, be it through work or romantic engagement—how did you mark the parameters of how to introduce these figures in his life to the reader, while keeping the focus on Isherwood?

KBThis is a technical matter, which really is key. If you do it right, hopefully readers are going to feel that you’re telling them a story and that without them being aware of it, you’ve handed them a little tiny bit of paper that lets them in on who this person is who just showed up in the story. You spend so much time mastering the background of, say, Gerald Heard, who is not famous but is a hugely learned and important figure in the history of religion and sociology, and then you’ve just got to run that in there very briefly. In editing Isherwood’s diaries I’d made these huge glossaries that are meant to help the reader who wants to know who they’re reading about, so I’d spent a lot of years with some of those people and I’d done a lot of footnotes. But to make that stuff seem weightless and gossamer and to appear naturally in the text is hugely demanding. You don’t get it on the first go-through, you work at it and work at it. You don’t want to introduce the person with cliché, you have to make this person fresh and alive. It can’t be something you got off Wikipedia. I found it helpful to imagine that I was telling a neighbor at a dinner party about the person: is it “Oh, she just won the prize for such and such,” or is it “He has a boyfriend at home who only has one leg.” What’s the thing that’s going to help the reader most? It’s incredibly interesting to do that work, but by the time you’ve got your answer, you’ve probably forgotten what the question was, as the writer. So then you have to go back to your paragraph and sew in that little stitch and try to make it look like it’s not a patch but part of the actual weave of what you’re telling.

JZWe have to talk about Don Bachardy. I found myself responding to their relationship differently as I read the book. I was touched by the love. I was dismayed by the toxicity. I was repelled by a slight codependence—

KBGood.

JZI’m curious what your take was.

KBI think all of the above. The fluctuations in their relationship are so real, and they articulate outwardly what many of us experience inwardly in our most intimate relationships. These are two people whose interior censors were carefully and deliberately pushed aside as they grew and developed as artists. They wanted to get down in the dirty place where it all comes from. No holds barred. So all that stuff you feel, that’s what I felt. And it’s real. Don has said that he’d love to be the older guy sentimentally standing up in front of an applauding audience and talking about thirty-three years of love and loyalty and whatever, but as the years have gone by, the unfiltered truth is important: it was a relationship and it was difficult. With everything that happened, they absolutely did stay together. And that’s where I find the example that I’d like to follow. Whatever you go through in a relationship, if you can possibly handle it and not break up, the payoff is huge. In A Single Man [1964], there was a big temptation for Isherwood to portray a homosexual relationship as somehow more successful than a heterosexual relationship, because in that period you needed to do that in order to persuade the culture to shift. But I think it’s okay now to say, No, no perfection here either. It’s different, it’s real.

JZI think one of the great strengths of the book is that you’re unflinching in depicting those moments and those warts, so to speak. It makes the portrait more truthful, but also, as a reader, your relationship to him is stronger for it.

KBIf you wanted to take a life lesson from it, Isherwood really grew throughout his life by saying, “I will put my arms around something bigger and harder than I expected it to be.” And he just kept on doing that. And I too as a human being would like to be able to do that. He was really good at being friends with people and holding out through the tough times. I think we could all learn from that.